Ten years ago today, Microsoft launched what would become the world's most popular desktop operating system - for better or worse. Its interface colours were... Interesting (trying hard to avoid bias here, folks, bear with me now). Its early performance was... Not always entirely up to par. Its security track record was... Well, it sucked hard in that department (I tried). We're ten years down the line, and thanks to Vista, way too many people are still using this relic.

Speaking from personal experience, if a piece of digital electronics passess acceptance test with a certain performance, and it still passes all functional tests years later (i.e. the hardware components are not faulty), then it will also still pass all performance tests.

Digital electronics either work, or fail. On or off. Go or No go. There is no "maybe".

As an example, I work at an algo-trading fund; since speed is so important to what we do, we use hardware TCP to handle our data feeds from electronic markets.

a recent example occurred (http://bit.ly/hEzHl5) when Intel pulled their 6-series chipsets due to time degredation of SATA ports. Note that the chipsets wouldn't fail outright; instead, as the hardware degraded, the error rates would simply increase to unacceptable levels.

Speaking from personal experience, if a piece of digital electronics passess acceptance test with a certain performance, and it still passes all functional tests years later (i.e. the hardware components are not faulty), then it will also still pass all performance tests. Digital electronics either work, or fail. On or off. Go or No go. There is no "maybe".

This implies transmissions over a cable. Analogue.

Deary me. In spite of the criticism you've received in this thread, I was willing to assume in good faith that you knew at least a little bit about how computer hardware actually works. It turn out, however, that you clearly don't have the faintest fucking idea what you're talking about.

What's even more depressing is that you appear to have spent 6158 posts on OSNews to get to this stage...

"Speaking from personal experience, if a piece of digital electronics passess acceptance test with a certain performance, and it still passes all functional tests years later (i.e. the hardware components are not faulty), then it will also still pass all performance tests. Digital electronics either work, or fail. On or off. Go or No go. There is no "maybe". This implies transmissions over a cable. Analogue.

Deary me. In spite of the criticism you've received in this thread, I was willing to assume in good faith that you knew at least a little bit about how computer hardware actually works. It turn out, however, that you clearly don't have the faintest f--king idea what you're talking about. What's even more depressing is that you appear to have spent 6158 posts on OSNews to get to this stage... "

Deary me.

Here you go, here is a description of an ethernet transceiver IC (warning, PDF).